August 27 news, from foreign media reports, after the UMC, TSMC and other wafer foundries have announced price increases, Samsung Electronics' wafer department is also interested in joining the tide of price increases, the outside world is expected that Samsung Electronics will officially open the price increase in the fourth quarter, and will also outsource some of the smart phone AP capacity.
South Korea's Economic Daily previously quoted Jaeyong Song, a professor at Seoul National University, as saying that due to the continuous tight supply of the global chip industry, Samsung's wafer division has been in a state of full load in recent times. In order to better respond to customer orders, Samsung even outsourced the production of some application processors for galaxy series mobile phones.
The price increase is not empty, in addition to the recent intensive price increases of peers, Samsung has also indirectly revealed the news of price increases before.
Suh Byung hoon, vice president of Samsung, said at the second quarter earnings conference last month that Samsung will rationalize the oem price, and it is expected that the revenue of Samsung's electronic wafer business will increase by more than 20% this year, in addition to the continuous production of production capacity, price increases will be an important source of revenue growth.
South Korea's "Economic Daily" further said that in addition to the price increase of wafer manufacturers will bring more costs to technology giants such as Apple, it will also significantly affect the automotive industry, and the cost is expected to rise further for the automotive industry, which is suffering from the shortage of automotive chips.
Park Jae gun, a professor at Hanyang University in South Korea, said that in order to cope with the global chip shortage, wafer manufacturers have made large-scale investments in capacity expansion, research and development and EUV equipment purchases.
While more revenue will be achieved in the long run, these expenses have greatly weakened the profitability of fabs at this stage. However, in order to cope with external competition, these investments are considered necessary, and fabs must pre-empt and actively order equipment to remain competitive.
Previously, foreign media quoted supply chain sources as saying that Samsung's 3nm process process using full surround gate transistor (GAA) technology is unlikely to be mass-produced before 2023, not only the more difficult 3nmGAP version, even the 3nmGAE version is not very realistic.
Samsung previously announced that it will mass-produce 3nm as early as 2022, and this 3nm process is the 3GAE version, that is, 3nm gate-all-around early, which Samsung calls the trial-and-error version. As for the 3nm version that may be officially mass-produced in 2023, it is 3GAP, that is, 3nm gate-all-around plus, that is, the enhanced version of the 3nm process, and the two are different in mass production rate and performance.
For the real strength of Samsung 3nm, the foreign Digitimes website also gives detailed data analysis, combined with the standard parameters released by TSMC and Intel, it can be seen that TSMC's 3-nanometer process can do 290 million / square millimeter, Samsung's 3-nanometer process is only 170 million / square millimeter, and even Intel's 7nm process is not comparable to the parameters.
Samsung has always taken the GAA architecture as its main advantage and selling point in the promotion of its 3nm process, and Samsung said that the performance of the 3nm process using the Gate-All-Around FET (GAA) is better than that of TSMC, which uses the fin field effect architecture (FinFET). GaA architecture transistors provide better electrostatic characteristics than FinFETs to meet certain gate width requirements.
At present, for the (Gate-All-Around FET, GAA) architecture, TSMC also has its own attitude, and also said at the technical seminar in 2020 that TSMC said that it will introduce full surround gate (GAA) technology at the 2nm node, and at this stage, TSMC will still use the fin field effect architecture (FinFET).
From the perspective of time, TSMC's 3nm process mass production time has been determined earlier than Samsung. Technically, TSMC 3nm is still using the FinFET architecture, while Samsung uses full surround gate technology (GAA), but due to different interpretations of each company, coupled with different production processes and yield rates, Samsung can not actually achieve technical advantages in the 3nm process.
On Tuesday, Samsung Electronics announced that over the next three years, parent company Samsung Group will invest 240 trillion won (about 1.33 trillion yuan) in the post-pandemic era, expanding its footprint in biopharmaceuticals, artificial intelligence (AI), semiconductors and robotics, and creating 10,000 new jobs.
Among Samsung's many investment projects, semiconductors occupy the most important position, and about 80% of the investment is expected to be used in the semiconductor business.
Samsung hopes the investment through 2023 will help strengthen the group's global position in key industries such as chip manufacturing, and the 240 trillion won investment is 30% higher in scale than the three-year investment strategy proposed by Samsung Group in 2018.
Samsung Electronics told the outside world that the chip industry is the safety board of the Korean economy, Samsung's active large-scale investment can also be seen as a survival strategy, from the current market point of view, once South Korea loses the competitiveness of semiconductors, it is almost impossible to make a comeback.
Samsung Electronics' advance execution of its non-storage business investment appears to be a strategy to start mass production of 3nm chips next year, thus competing with TSMC and Intel for market share. Samsung has confirmed that the 3nm process will be postponed to 2023, TSMC 3nm process will enter mass production in the second half of next year as scheduled, although Samsung is still behind TSMC in process technology, but thanks to the current tight chip market, it is expected that the revenue of Samsung's wafer division will still have large-scale growth.